Charlie Kirk and Trump’s looming political crackdown

The shocking assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk last week was part of a wider, horrific trend: the rise of political violence in America. But Kirk’s murder also seemed to reveal something even darker. Before a suspect was found—when facts were scarce—the race for political retribution was already well underway. 

On Tuesday, Utah prosecutors charged 22-year-old Tyler Robinson with seven counts related to Kirk’s death, including aggravated murder. The charging documents say Robinson described Kirk as someone who “spreads too much hate.” According to prosecutors, Robinson’s mother told investigators her son had started to lean to the left politically and that he was “becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.” She said her son was in a relationship with his roommate, and that the roommate was transitioning. Prosecutors also released a text exchange between Robinson and that roommate shortly after Kirk’s death, in which Robinson confesses to the crime.

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump and other top White House officials threatened to crack down on what they describe as a coordinated movement of left-wing organizations that are inciting violence against conservatives. So far, there is no evidence that Robinson was part of a larger plot targeting right-wing activists. But the political rhetoric coming from the White House is part of a scenario that experts have long warned about: using public tragedy to accelerate political division.

Trump “is immediately casting blame on his political opponents, demonizing and turning the heat up,” Mother Jones National Affairs Editor Mark Follman tells More To The Story host Al Letson. “And that is a recipe for more violence. The very top of our political leadership is stoking a political and cultural war.”

Reveal listeners might be familiar with Follman’s reporting from the episode “Lessons From a Mass Shooter’s Mother,” where he re-investigates a 2014 mass shooting in Isla Vista, Calif., through conversations with the shooter’s mother. On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Follman examines America’s spiraling political discourse, why early explanations of motive in gun violence incidents are almost always misguided, and why the Trump administration is cutting federal funding for programs meant to prevent violent incidents like Kirk’s assassination.

This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.

Al Letson: Mark, you’ve been covering the rise of political violence for a while now. The assassination of Charlie Kirk was shocking in so many ways, but also the kind of thing experts have been warning about. I’m wondering just how you reacted when you first heard about it.

Well, when I first saw the news, I was just really sickened. This is a horrendous killing, and I felt really disgusted by it, and deeply sad. Here’s a person engaging in political debate on a college campus, killed before our eyes. Nothing can justify that. And I know we’re living in a time where politics is as fierce as ever, but that’s just wrong, and I felt really heartbroken for his family, a wife and young kids. I felt really, really heartsick for all those college kids who had to witness that.

The video, as you know, was circulating widely on the internet almost instantly, really gruesome footage, and I felt heartbroken for our country, because I knew this is going somewhere even worse now. And that’s the other thing I felt, Al. I was just really worried, and felt really distressed right away. Immediately, I knew viscerally that the reactions to this could have really heavy repercussions for our country. It’s an escalation of a trend of political violence that we’ve been living with for years now.

And I was really feeling kind of the weight of the subject matter that I’ve been focused on for many years, reporting for the better part of a decade on these acts of targeted violence, with a big focus on school shootings and mass shootings, but also this rise of political violence that we’ve been experiencing in recent years, and thinking a lot about what drives people to do this and how we’re reacting as a society. And I just felt like this is all getting even worse now.

I mean, the minute I saw the footage, I thought that, wow, are we headed into a civil war? Because the fact that we are in such a politically charged moment just felt like this could be the fuse that lights it all.

It certainly has a feeling to it that is pivotal. And that’s what I’m hearing too from a lot of the sources I talk with in the world of threat assessment and violence prevention, top experts in this work who have been sounding the alarm for years in conversations that I’ve been having with them about the kind of rhetoric we’re seeing and these kinds of attacks and escalation in school and mass shootings that we’ve been living with for more than a decade. And this is feeling like we’re really moving into a darker place now because of this killing of such a high-profile figure in such a politically charged environment.

So in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, a narrative took hold almost instantly. I mean, it felt like as soon as his death was pronounced that there was a rush to blame and laid at the feet of political opponents. What does that tell us about politics today? How is it different from previous acts of political violence?

Well, I think what we saw in the past week since this happened represents, really, an escalation of a process that we’ve been watching grow in terms of how our society, our country, responds to an attack like this, a high-profile act of very traumatic violence, whether it’s an assassination, we’ve had several events like that in recent times, the killing of the lawmakers in Minnesota, the CEO in Manhattan last year, the attempt on President Trump’s life. The reactions to that have been getting, I think, more and more spiraled up, and that is combining now, I think, with a pattern we’ve seen for a long time when there’s a school or mass shooting in America, particularly high-profile ones, where there’s high numbers of casualties. There’s always this rush to try to assign blame instantly, to try to understand the motive. And that’s, I think, a relatable way of thinking about it.

People want to know why would someone do this horrific thing. But the reality is, in a lot of these cases, it can be very difficult to figure out the answer to that question. And that’s something that I’ve seen in studying the problem of these kinds of attacks, targeted violence, whether it’s school shootings or political assassinations or otherwise. In many of these cases, and I’ve studied hundreds of them over the past 13 years, it is often very difficult to sort through the forensic evidence in the case even over a longer period of time, let alone in the first 24, 48 hours, to try to understand why a person does this.

And so we see this rush to judgment and we see this rush to assign ideological blame that is really ignoring that reality, that it’s really become about the political narrative now more than the facts of a case. In trying to understand the motive in an attack like this, it’s really important to acknowledge that even at this point a week later, there’s still so much that we do not know about this suspect, evidence that may come out in the days ahead, in the weeks ahead, or maybe a long time from now. In this case, the suspect is alive. So over the long term, we may learn more. In many of these cases, that’s not possible because the person’s dead, has in many cases committed suicide.

How do you categorize President Trump’s reaction to Kirk’s murder?

It’s very troubling. It was very troubling to watch. I mean, within hours, he’s giving a speech from the Oval Office, blaming this horrific murder on a college campus on this kind of broad population, what he calls the radical left. He’s assigning a political narrative to it. There isn’t even a suspect in custody at that point. We don’t know who’s done this. And that to me is case in point of the problem we’re facing now, that that rush to judgment is no longer about finding out what the facts are first.

Trump is not also, as president of the United States, I think he’s doing something rather unusual in our contemporary history, something that he does certainly to much greater extreme than I think we’ve seen in decades, if ever, which is to say that he is not interested in a message of uniting the country, of turning down the temperature, of trying to calm Americans at a time when I think many people are feeling extremely worried and distressed by an event like this, and to try to bring people together. He’s not interested in that. He is immediately casting blame on his political opponents, demonizing, and turning the heat up, and that is a recipe for more violence. When I talk to threat-assessment professionals about that, they’re very concerned by this. The very top of our political leadership is stoking a political and cultural war.

Are there commonalities for people who commit acts of political violence? And if so, then how do we as a country make sure they can’t access weapons?

So this is a complicated problem. I mean, there is a whole range of the types of people who will do something like this, and I’m talking about the case history of these kinds of attacks. People tend to want to categorize them or try to land on a certain profile or a certain political motivation. But the reality, if you look across all these cases, is a whole mix of things.

And so really, what the work of behavioral threat assessment does, this violence-prevention method that I’ve been writing about for many years now, looks at the behavioral process leading up to an attack like this. What are the patterns of behavior and circumstances that we can identify in a person who may be moving toward an act of violence like this? And within that, there’s a whole range of ideological mess and motivations, and it’s very wrapped up of course now in digital technology, and particularly with young people, who are spending a lot of their lives online and are being influenced by all kinds of things there. And we see that in this case too, right down to the engravings that were reported being written on as ammunition. What does all that mean? And it becomes this grab-bag that people can use to further their political narrative of the case.

So some of the responses following the shootings were pretty profound and accusatory, and studies of course have shown that inflammatory rhetoric can be dangerous and in some cases provoke violence. A term that I just learned about, stochastic terrorism. Can you explain that a little bit?

Sure. I think we should acknowledge first, that in the reaction to this event, we saw some really extreme things kind of across the board, right? I mean, there were people, some people online celebrating this murder. That is wrong. It’s a reflection of where we are with political rhetoric in our country. Then we saw, as you say, a lot of this rush to accuse and assign blame with essentially no evidence. We didn’t even know who the perpetrator was or who the suspect was at that point. Those kinds of responses flow into a political dynamic that I’ve been reporting about for years in the Trump era, stochastic terrorism, which refers to how a high-profile public figure, usually a political leader, sometimes leaders of terrorist movements, will use language to try to incite fear and rage and violence in their followers, and it’s done in a way that has a certain plausible deniability to it.

So when confronted about this, and we saw this with Trump during his first administration, when confronted about this, they’ll deny, oh, I wasn’t saying anyone should do anything violent, but meanwhile, that person is whipping up fear and using very demagogic language about the opponent. I mean, you look at the story of January 6th. That’s an insurrection that Donald Trump incited with language, over and over again telling this narrative that the country was going to be destroyed if his supporters didn’t go and do something about it to stop what he called was a stolen election, which was a lie.

So the way that we can translate that here into a response to a horrific political assassination is to look at the language that’s being used. And again, I was very troubled by some of the things Trump said from the White House, because he’s really starting to shape a narrative of martyrdom about Charlie Kirk, and about going after this broadly painted enemy, political enemy that’s… He has said, literally, “We’re going to go after each and every person who’s responsible for this,” as if it’s some big political conspiracy, when in fact, from everything we know so far, this is the act of lone, individual, lone, troubled individual.

Are high-profile acts of political violence surging right now? Because it feels like we are, when you look at what happened in Minnesota and then Charlie Kirk, it just kind of feels like we’re heading towards something.

I think it depends on how you measure the data. Certainly we’re in a period of, I think, heightened political extremism in our public debate, in our politics, and acts of violence that are swirling around that. I mean, there have been times in history before where we’ve had major political assassinations and a lot of unrest and struggle in the country, but I would agree that this feels like a time where it is increasing, it has increased. It is more worrisome than it has been certainly in recent memory. And these types of attacks we’re seeing, I think, are escalating as well.

I mean, what happened with the killing of Charlie Kirk, you can look back at the recent assassination of a healthcare CEO on the streets of New York that had politics wrapped up in it. You can look at the attempts on President Trump’s life, the young man who tried to kill him in Butler, Pennsylvania during the campaign and was killed. And so we’re seeing a trend of that type of act again, which I think prior to the last couple of years we had not seen a whole lot of in recent times.

Do we have any solid proof that words can trigger violent acts? I mean, because when I think about January 6th, as we talked about earlier, President Trump distanced himself from any of the violence because he’s just talking to his supporters. So is there anything that we have that can quantifiably say that this triggers that?

I think it’s very hard to talk about it in terms of direct causation, because the forensic evidence in a case of violence is often complex, and a lot of factors feed into why someone will go out and commit an act like this. That being said, I think when the political temperature is higher, we do tend to see more violence of this nature, and when I talk to experts in violence prevention and political violence talking in terms of a solution to this, the first thing they’ll say is, well, you really need to have a solution that is both top-down and ground-up, top-down meaning the leaders of our country need to really step up and change the message, change the narrative, and say, this is not the way we want to be in America. We don’t hear a whole lot of that right now. We certainly don’t hear from the Trump administration.

I do think it’s been interesting to watch the Utah governor, Spencer Cox, respond to this, because he’s tried to sound some of that message, and I think that’s been part of his political approach, to talk about disagreeing better and to try to take the temperature down. But at the same time, he has also come out and really pushed the idea that leftist ideology is behind this attack, which is not helpful in that regard. So as a whole, we are not seeing that kind of top-down response that experts have told me continually over the years. We really need to try to change this trajectory to move away from political violence. I think the same is true from the ground up, at the community level. You need people thinking about how they’re using language, whether it’s online or offline, and trying to shift the narrative away from this stuff. And I think that we’re in an environment right now where that has been de-emphasized to our peril.

You’ve reported about a program called the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, known as CP3, which was recently stripped of its funding. What kind of work did that program do?

CP3 was a program in the Department of Homeland Security that was focused on early intervention to try to prevent acts of violence like this and terrorism. This is a growing field in recent years in our country, both within the federal government and other entities, state and local governments as well. This intersects very much with the work of behavioral threat assessment that I was talking about earlier. Essentially, this involves work of a group of experts in law enforcement, mental health care, education systems, faith leaders in a community coming together to handle cases of concern, when a person is raising concern in a community, acting in ways that are causing people to worry they might be turning violent, and trying to step in and help them and intervene. CP3 had a staff of about 40 people who were building these programs with states throughout the United States.

And recently, the Trump administration has either fired or reassigned most of the people working in the program, and there are other programs like this as well in the federal government that had been defunded or in the process of being shut down. I talked to the leader of the CP3 program a couple months ago, and he told me about the level of traction they were getting over the last couple of years in partnership with state and local governments to build these programs that try to identify a person like the one who allegedly just killed Charlie Kirk, to find better ways to identify when a person is going in that direction and to intervene earlier on what they call upstream intervention, through counseling programs, through educational support, or employment support, things like this that are constructive in nature, to deal with someone who may be planning violence, and it’s a very effective approach.

I’ve looked at a lot of cases over the years of this kind of prevention work that helps get people off of what the field of threat assessment calls the pathway to violence. It’s a process, in many cases over a very long period of time, where someone is building up to an act of violence. And there are ways that we can detect that and intervene before it happens. The Trump administration has largely dismantled that at this point, at the federal level.

What strikes me about Kirk’s death and the evidence right now that we have, i.e. the bullet casings, the shell casings, that all of the things that were on the shell casings lead to very deep dark corners of the internet, things that I think that I know a little bit about because we report on these issues, but even some of those sayings I didn’t know anything about. It just seems like preventing those seeds to be sown on people who are in these obscure, to most Americans, I would say, obscure parts of the internet, seems really hard to find them. So I’m just curious, how do you do that work when people are burrowed so deeply?

So there’s good news here, Al, in terms of this particular aspect of the problem. I think there’s a tendency for people to think that people, particularly young people, are being radicalized online by these obscure dark things and that that’s the sum total of what’s happening here. But that’s really not the reality in these cases at all. When you have a person engaging in that type of material in this way, there’s invariably a whole bunch of other stuff going wrong with that person. And in most cases that are headed toward a violent attack, an act of targeted violence, that person is also showing warning signs in other ways too, and people around them are likely to see these things. They may not understand them, but we’re talking about a person who’s starting to say strange things, whether online or off, is deteriorating in ways personally. Things aren’t going well. Maybe they’ve dropped out of school, lost a job, had a failure in an intimate relationship. All of these cases are marked by a whole set of factors like that.

And when you have a person like that who is causing concern and not doing well and is also engaging in this type of material online, that’s what you’re going to look at to try to understand the pathway that they’re on and how to help them. I’m confident we will see that in this case too. It’s still very much early days, even though there’s just been this really extreme rush to judgment and an extreme rush to try to interpret all these bits of information that have come out so far about the suspect in this killing. There’s still so much that we don’t know, and I think that’s very important to keep in mind.

That said, we have also seen an emerging pattern with young perpetrators. I mean, this guy is… the suspect’s 22. The shooter in Butler was around that age. The killer in Manhattan was around that age. They’re all engaging in this material. That’s telling us something about kind of this new generation of the problem, so to speak. And I think that’s important that we pay attention to that. It tends to be this whole kind of smorgasbord of stuff, right? Memes and different ideological ideas. And that’s actually a clue to the reality of this too, that no one of those things tells you what the motive is. It’s very hard to say someone like this is a extremist on the left or the right, or anti-this or anti-that. That may be true, but it takes a while to sort that out. And again, I think that points to the cultural and political time we’re in where that process is just now being basically ignored for other purposes of weaponizing a political narrative. And I think it’s very troubling.

I know that during the Obama administration, gun sales skyrocketed. I’m curious if that is still the case, and if the rise in guns also ties into the rise of violence that we’re seeing politically.

Certainly I think it is a significant factor. Gun sales ebb and flow, and there is some evidence in reporting suggesting that it’s tied to the ebb and flow of our politics. But the broader picture here is clear. We already had a lot of guns in this country even before the pandemic, but there was a real surge in buying during and after the pandemic. We’ve also seen a considerable loosening of firearm regulations throughout the country in the last several years.

So really, the big picture we’re talking about here is more guns than ever before in circulation. There are more than 400 million in the country. That’s more than the overall population of the United States, roughly 330 million people. There are 20, 25 million estimated AR-15s in circulation. We’re seeing more use of those in the last decade, in mass shootings and school shootings. So there’s correlation here. I think combined with the broader political atmosphere, you have to think, this is an effect that we’re seeing too from firearm ownership combining with political rhetoric and the political atmosphere in our country. It’s a difficult thing to study because it’s multifactorial, but as a general picture, I think yes, it’s certainly part of what we’re experiencing now in America.

The video of Kirk’s shooting was playing on autoplay on X for hours and hours. That felt like a genuinely new and horrific element to this. What’s the risk of our normalizing this type of violence?

I think this is another very tough part of this broader problem, right? Because we are seeing more of that now. I remember a decade or so ago, there was a workplace shooting rampage in Virginia, where an ex-television employee went and shot two of his colleagues and filmed it. You remember that? And put it on social media, and it was circulating, and that was very shocking at the time because it was essentially new. It’s not so new anymore. And not only that, this footage of the killing of Charlie Kirk was really horrific, really gruesome. You’re talking about thousands of people witnessing this live, and then now the whole world is witnessing it almost immediately after, and there’s no way to stop that on social media platforms, or so they say. This is a big problem, because I think it may desensitize people and it may also normalize it in a way that is very counterproductive to trying to reverse course.

Does it feel like it could lead to copycats?

I think so, and that’s actually another thing I want to touch on here, with all of the extremely online behavior and the memes and the circulation of the video. One thing that we know very clearly from studying cases of targeted violence, school shooters, mass shooters, political assassins, there’s a very strong desire in many cases, evidence of this, that the perpetrator wants attention, wants infamy and notoriety. And there are increasingly sensational ways to get that, through the video of the attacks. We see more perpetrators trying to live stream their own attacks, or circulate video or watch video of attacks before they go do them, to emulate and talk about previous attackers. There’s reporting in this case that the suspected killer of Charlie Kirk was on a discord chat after carrying out the attack, talking with others about the assassination in New York last year of the healthcare CEO.

And it’s a really, I think, strong example of how people doing this now are paying attention to others who do it, and perhaps want to be like them. And part of that is getting attention, gaining infamy and notoriety. And I think this is a cost to what’s happening now that hasn’t really been talked about yet. The weight of this event and the way it’s being used politically makes it bigger and bigger and bigger. And if you’re someone who wants big attention, you learn by watching this that you can get big attention by going and doing something like this.

There are elements of this too, in the attempted killing of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. That perpetrator, there’s evidence in that case that is public, and things that I’ve heard about from sources, that suggest strongly that he was interested in maximal notoriety. And what better way to get it than to try to assassinate the president of the United States?

So I think we have to think about that too, and how we process all this in our politics and in our media. Right now, there’s a very big kind of martyr narrative being pushed by the Trump administration and being discussed in the media. And if you’re a person who is struggling and mentally troubled and thinking about violence of this nature, you’re now seeing next-level infamy and notoriety playing out in this case.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.